Go west with PBS
in this behind-the-scenes look at the television
series that sent modern-day Americans back in time to the
harsh frontier of 1880s Montana.

Americas period of westward expansion has
long captured the imagination of history buffs and adventurous spirits; the
era seems to embody the very daring enterprise that made America what it is
today. As a result, frontier life has often been romanticized in television
and film.

But all of that changed with PBSs Frontier
House. Bringing the trials and triumphs of nineteenth-century homesteaders
to life in a way we might never have imagined, Frontier House re-creates
life in the wilderness for three households of spirited twenty-first-century
Americans and documents their six-month experience for television.

Roughing it on their allotted plots of land while
all of America watches, these brave souls relinquish grocery stores, microwaves,
and plumbing in favor of raising chickens, churning butter, and outhouses.
Gone are all the modern amenities theyre accustomed to. In their place:
just the will to do whatever it takes to survive.

Covering the inception of the show, the historical
basis for the lifestyle re-created, the selection of the participants, the
logistical challenges of production, and the impact of this experiment on
the participantsalong with profiles of actual nineteenth-century homesteadersFrontier House is a first-rate companion to one of the most
innovative and fascinating reality shows of our time.

Hallelujah! After a 10-year absence, Hannah (Airships;
High Lonesome) is back with a vengeance with a Southern gothic novel
full of every kind of excess: violence, sex, religiosity, creepiness and humor.
Here we have Tennessee Williams,
Flannery OConnor, Harry Crews, Peter Dexter and Clyde Edgerton all squished
together, baked in hush-puppy batter, dipped in honey and sprinkled with Jim
Beam.

Set in a lake community in the vicinity of Vicksburg,
Miss., the story revolves around a fellow named Man Mortimer, a thief, pimp
and murderer and those are his good qualities who physically resembles the
late country singer Conway Twitty. On his trail are Byron Egan, a somewhat
reformed biker-turned-preacher and prophet, and Max Raymond, a former doctor
who plays saxophone in a bar band and has an attractive Cuban wife who sings,
sometimes for the band, sometimes nude in her back yard. Meanwhile, the young
town sheriff, distrusted since he hails from the North, manages to shock even
the most degenerate denizens of the area with his affair with a luscious 72-year-old
widow.

The plot is kaleidoscopic, with flashes and slashes
of wonder, humor and the macabre expertly mixed. Hannah tosses off linguistic
gems on almost every page: … sometimes he felt he was a whole torn
country, afire in all quadrants. Describing a car, It smelled
like very lonely oil men.

Reading todays fiction is too often like eating
stale bread. With Hannah (finalist for the American Book Award and the National
Book Award), just imagine your most mouthwatering meal, take a double helping
and youve come close to the pleasure of reading this book. Copyright
2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Best of the Oxford American

Edited by Marc Smirnoff and Rick Bragg

Hill Street Press (Paperback, $16.95, ISBN: 1588180816)

Publication date: May 2002

Description:

A comprehensive anthology of The
Oxford Americans most memorable pieces published during the first
decade of the magazines existence, these articles prove provocative, opinionated,
and irreverent. The Oxford American has served as an incubator and archive
for the most promising and most established voices in contemporary Southern
writing. It offers up an extraordinary range of perspectives on a multitude
of subjects, while always avoiding the hackneyed notion of the South as the
exclusive province of the gothic or the sentimental dominion of moonlight and
magnolias. Collected here are the magazines stellar fiction and poetry
offered alongside its best commentary, profiles, photography, comics, and reporting
on politics, history, religions, art, books, film, and humor.

A classic book about the environmental triumph
that saved a southeast Mississippi wetland.

Preserving the Pascagoula re-creates one
of the more exciting sagas in the history of wilderness preservation—the
ultimately successful fight to protect the vast, magnificent, little-known Pascagoula
Swamp in southeastern Mississippi.

The Pascagoula, in terms of discharge volume, remains
the largest undammed, unaltered river system in the continental United States.
The story of how it was saved, with several heroes, no great villains, and a
happy ending, will remind the environmental community that now and then the
“good guys” do win.

More than the suspenseful retelling of this achievement,
Preserving the Pascagoula details the unusual strategy whereby the fight
was won. It serves as a blueprint of how a state government created from scratch
one of the finest natural area programs in America today.

This is the story of the most effective nonprofit
land acquisition group in the nation, The Nature Conservancy, and its innovative
Natural Heritage Program that calls upon states to inventory and protect threatened
ecosystems. It is also the story of Mississippis response to the Heritage
idea, a response that has served as a model for other states.

Finally, this is the account of a handful of dedicated
people, ranging in their commitments from counterculture activism to staid conservatism.
The unlikely alliance of these disparate groups suggests how much even a few
individuals can accomplish against great odds, if they have the will and the
nerve.

Preserving the Pascagoula could have been
just one more account of a dramatic eleventh-hour confrontation between environmentalists
and developers. More than that, it suggests many ways in which people who want
to save our wilderness heritage can initiate action, instead of merely reacting
to threats to the environment.

This new edition of Preserving the Pascagoula
is published by the Mississippi Commission on Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks.
Support and assistance for this effort has come from The Nature Conservancy
of Mississippi, Audubon Mississippi, the Mississippi Department of Wildlife,
Fisheries, and Parks, and the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science.

Donald G. Schueler is the author of A Handmade
Wilderness, Incident at Eagle Ranch: Predators as Prey in the American West,
The Temple of the Jaguar: Travels in the Yucatan, and Adventuring along
the Gulf of Mexico.